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Monday, 22 July 2013

Cameron's new internet filter

Cameron, in the name of protecting the little kiddies
from the evils of porn, is pushing a filter on all the internet in Britain to
filter out online porn. To duck around it, you have to call up your ISP and say
“RAWR GIMME MAH PORN I WANNA WANK” or some such. Probably not in so many ways,
but making it explicitly opt out means you have to contact your IP and
expressly say you want to see the naked people which promises to be extremely
embarrassing.

There are many things wrong with this.

This degree of internet control, tracking and meddling is
discomforting to say the least

The fact the man who is still supporting Page 3 is also
in favour of a ban on porn is indicative of who pays the Tory’s paychest

Frankly, it’s people’s damn choice if we want to
watch/read/look at other nekked people doing happy adult things and we
shouldn’t have to opt out of being controlled. And yes it’s sad if children see
something inappropriate – well that’s what parents are for. Doing that whole
parenting thing. Because believe me there’s a damn site more worrying on the
internet than your children seeing some inappropriate jiggly bits.

And let’s be clear here – while the morality brigade screams about child porn
(which we already have laws about), this is about all pornography – or everything
that is defined as pornography. Defined by who? I have no idea. And that’s
shady already – what counts as porn? This is particularly worrying to GBLT
people because we’ve seen time and again videos or depictions of GBLT people
considered “adult” when a similar depiction of straight people would pass
anyone’s censor. Us holding hands or kissing or gay men standing too close to
each other while being shirtless has been considered pornographic in the past.
What is pornographic?

Which brings me to a major complaint I have - internet
filters are awful. Part of that is the aforementioned inability to adequately
define porn, but part of it is that the inability for technology to recognise a
porn site. Does it block a certain percentage of skin showing? Certain body
parts? Certain words? Is it going to include pornographic blogs or tumblrs or
flickrs or whatever else people use?

The technology is dubious to say the least. At present,
various filters in the name of stopping porn block STD clinics, family planning
clinics, breast feeding sites, rape crisis centres, sex advice sites like
scarleteen and, of course, any site involving GBLT people. In fact, Tumblr’s filter
is a prime example which is has started blocking searches
for the words #gay #lesbian and #bisexual.

This isn’t an isolated case, it’s what happens every
single time there’s a filter – there are false positives and GBLT people
inevitably get included in them because our existence is still regarded as
inherently pornographic and “adult”. And
if you think a 15 year old asking their parents to take off the porn block because
they want to see porn is a difficult prospect, change that to a 15 year old asking
their parents to take it off because they want to see gay blogs and connect to
the gay community.